Inter-Asia Cultural​Studies SocietyConference 2019

August 1 - 3, 2019Silliman University, Dumaguete City, Philippines

THEME STATEMENT

"FLUID CIRCUITS: CULTURES OF KNOWLEDGE AFTER THE DIGITAL TURN"

The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies(IACS) network is now over two decades old, and this is the first time the IACS biennial conference is being held in the Philippines. It is also only the third time the conference has come to South-East Asia, after Singapore 2013 and Surabaya 2015.

Powered by the notion of ‘South-East-Asia’ as a cultural and political imaginary, this IACS Conference dwells on the complexities and possibilities of connection – over water, land, air and cyberspace. An archipelagic gravity contributes to grounding the subterranean flows that have marked the region for centuries, and that take on other dimensions under newer regimes of globalization. As twentieth-century concerns about rights, citizenship, nationalism, and cultural identity are replayed and transformed in the twenty-first, and in the digital realm, the landscape of the region, and the geographies of Inter-Asia involvement, are re-configured. At the same time, the emergent dystopias and promises afforded by the digital present themselves for our reckoning. As older ways of thinking about self and society give way to identities converging in and through these ‘fluid circuits’ of dis/connection, how may we re-imagine the task of cultural studies?, For the conference thematics, click here